You ask it to draft an email. Tell it to summarize a report. You might even have it write a whole essay. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are incredible tools for efficiency. But what’s the hidden cost of all this convenience? Is offloading our mental work to AI slowly eroding our cognitive abilities? A recent study from the MIT Media Lab, titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” tackled this very question, and the findings are a wake-up call for us all. In this blog, we will explore the experiment conducted by MIT, understand its findings, and get the answer to the question: Is ChatGPT making us dumber?

Table of contents

• The Experiment: Brains vs. Bots
• What Happens to Your Brain When You Use an LLM?
• The Memory Meltdown
• What Happens When the AI is Taken Away?
• Are We Accumulating a “Cognitive Debt”?
• So is ChatGPT making us Dumber?
• Conclusion

The Experiment: Brains vs. Bots

Researchers set up a fascinating experiment. They recruited 54 participants and split them into three groups of 18 each to write essays on SAT-level topics over several sessions:

• The LLM Group: Could only use ChatGPT (GPT-4)
• The Search Engine Group: Could use Google, but no LLMs
• The Brain-only Group: Had no access to any external tools, not even the internet

Using electroencephalography (EEG) headsets, the scientists measured the participants’ brain activity to see how their neural networks fired and connected during the writing process. The results were startling. The team also performed deep Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis on the essays, interviewed every participant, and had the essays graded by both human English teachers and a custom-built AI judge.

The experiment wasn’t a one-off; participants completed this process over three separate sessions. In the fourth and final session, the researchers swapped the groups. Only 18 participants took part. The LLM users wrote with only their brains, while the Brain-only group gained access to the LLM. Here, the true cost of AI assistance became clear.

What Happens to Your Brain When You Use an LLM?

The study found that brain connectivity systematically dropped with external help, either from Google search or LLMs. Although the effect of damage was different and relative to the level of help.

• The Brain-only group showed the strongest and most widespread neural networks, indicating deep cognitive engagement.?
• The Search Engine group was in the middle.?
• And the LLM group? They showed the weakest brain connectivity overall.

This suggests that when we rely only on our own minds, we engage a rich, complex web of brain regions for memory, planning, and creative thought. When we use helping tools like Google search or LLMs, our brains seem to offload that work, showing significantly less activity.

The level of activity decreases as the amount of support increases. Google search still required participants to use their thought process to combine all the information from various searches. Finally, all LLMs needed was a suitable prompt, and participants got a well-written essay requiring the least amount of cognitive activity. Thus, their brains made the least amount of neural “noise” while the brain-only group was the loudest, neurally.?

The Memory Meltdown

After writing their essays, participants were asked a simple question: “Can you quote any sentence from your essay without looking at it?”. The results were a complete shocker.

• In the first session, a staggering 83% of the LLM group failed to provide a correct quote from the essay they had just written. None of them produced a correct quote.
• Meanwhile, the Brain-only and Search Engine groups had near-perfect recall and quoting ability by the second session.

This memory failure as seen in the LLM only group directly correlates with the muted brain activity. The neural processes needed for deep semantic encoding and transferring information into long-term memory simply weren’t being triggered as strongly in the LLM group. This group also reported a lower sense of “ownership” over their essays, with many feeling disconnected from the work. It seems that when we don’t do the mental heavy lifting, the knowledge doesn’t stick, and we don’t feel the pride of creation.

Also Read: This is How AI Chatbots Impact Us – A Study by MIT and OpenAI

What Happens When the AI is Taken Away?

In the fourth and final session, researchers flipped the script.

• LLM-to-Brain: Participants who had been using ChatGPT were now asked to write with no tools.
• Brain-to-LLM: Participants who had been using only their brains were now given access to ChatGPT.

And the RESULTS are ALARMING!

The LLM-to-Brain group struggled. Their brain connectivity was weaker, showing an “under-engagement of alpha and beta networks,” which are crucial for internal attention, semantic processing, and creative thinking. They were stuck in a “cognitive deficiency”. Their writing even showed a bias towards LLM-specific vocabulary, reusing phrases from their AI-assisted sessions.

While in stellar contrast to this, the Brain-to-LLM group’s brain activity spiked. When these participants, who had been exercising their cognitive muscles, were given an LLM to rewrite a familiar essay, their brains showed higher memory recall and re-engagement of widespread brain networks. The act of integrating AI suggestions with their own deeply processed thoughts actually engaged more of their brain. Infact, the resulting essays were not just unique but showcased a level of finesse that made their essays stand out!

Are We Accumulating a “Cognitive Debt”?

Cognitive debt is a condition where “repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.” Like financial debt, you get immediate convenience as a loan, but you pay for it later with interest. The interest, in this case, is diminished critical thinking, weaker memory, and reduced creativity.

Thus, even though LLM-assisted essays were often longer and scored well by an AI judge, the human teachers evaluating the essays were not impressed. They described the LLM-generated texts as homogenous, lacking personal nuance, and simply “soulless”. This is a clear indication that continuously using LLMs without much of thought is adding a “Cognitive Debt” on our brain, which eventually would diminish our thinking and analytical skills.

Another interesting study: Unsettling AI Behavior: When Advanced LLMs Break the Rules and Resist Control

So is ChatGPT making us Dumber?

Well, maybe not now, but over time, with unchecked use: Definitely! The worst part is by the time that we realise what are trading for the comfort of this AI assistant, we might not be able to make a comeback. Scary as it may sound, but using AI could just be another drug type addiction that no one is yet warning us about.

But this isn’t a call to abandon AI. Tools like ChatGPT are powerful allies. But this research urges us to be mindful. Using an LLM to support an existing, self-driven thought process (like the Brain-to-LLM group) can be a powerful cognitive enhancer. But using it to replace thinking from the start may prevent us from building the strong neural pathways that lead to true learning, deep memory, and authentic creativity.

So, the next time you turn to your AI assistant, ask yourself a question: Are you outsourcing a task, or are you outsourcing your thinking?

Your brain will thank you for knowing the difference.

Find full research paper here.

Conclusion

The world around us is increasingly getting AI-fied. From personal to professional lives, LLM powered chatbots are helping us accomplish tasks as speeds and with accuracy that is unbeaten. But with great power, comes a great responsibility. The responsibility to understand the difference between master and the slave relies on us. As long us its our thoughts that align our research, using LLMs would help to enhance the final outputs but if its LLMs that take up the thinking, then all we can expect is a sub par output that would be similar to everyone who is using the same tools. Thereby, killing our uniquesness entirely and severly limiting the possibilities.

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